


The One Where Ryan Nearly Dies and You’re Conveniently There To Save Him

by Nightman Dennis (DemidovNotDicaprio)



Category: The Office US
Genre: Drug Mentions, Gen, and idk how to tag on here, breakdown ryan i guess, corporate ryan, idk he’s an idiot and i love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 12:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DemidovNotDicaprio/pseuds/Nightman%20Dennis
Summary: aw man when Ryan goes to corporate and becomes a terrible person? that i guess





	The One Where Ryan Nearly Dies and You’re Conveniently There To Save Him

“I think my friend has a drug problem.” His voice was detached down the phone, as if he was calling from the bottom of a very long tube and in the grand scheme of pick-up lines he’d used on you in the twilight hours, it wasn’t his most compelling.  
“You don’t have any friends Ryan,” you replied tiredly, “Do you want me to come over?”  
He made a noise like he’d been stood on, and the call shut off.

There had been flimsier pretexts on which you had up and uber’d to Ryan’s place in the small hours of the morning, though this one had been slightly darker and you allowed yourself to briefly entertain the notion that something might have been wrong. You only briefly considered this as an option as you assembled an outfit which, you would later that night learn, was not hospital-appropriate and would have been entirely better suited to lying on his bedroom floor, as you assumed would be the natural course of action. The night was bitingly cold and your college hoodie and short-offend-your-Catholic-grandmother-shorts felt inappropriate, so you were really hoping that Ryan appreciated the lengths you went to to please him, because it certainly wasn’t worth freezing your nipples off in mid-town New York autumn.

You knew something wrong when Ryan’s front door was unlocked, you were more than aware of his compulsive need to lock doors where he could, a hang-up you attributed to his being raised a very small house with overbearing parents. “Ryan?” You shouted into his apartment, which was more rooms of dirty clothes and empty cans arranged in a way you imagined modern art critics would call ‘challenging’. There was a vaguely human noise from the bedroom and you followed it, not not picturing yourself as a detective scouring a crime scene- a very sexy detective, you thought. 

His bedroom was ostensibly more of a mess than the rest of his apartment which was a not inconsiderable feat, given that he was making the mess of three men while living alone. The Ryan you were confronted with in his room was not the Ryan which usually booty-called you when he was bored, or when the online servers of whatever video game he was playing that month had gone down. He looked as though he’d been pushed onto his bed, limbs splayed out crime-scene style, and as you got closer to the rag-doll man, you noticed that he was sweating like a maniac and shivering. “Are you okay?” You asked quietly, trying to sit him up against the headboard, he was ice-cold in spite of the sweat. This was a good indicator that he was not okay, and you felt a little stupid for asking.  
“I think I’m dying,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, “Like, for real.”  
“Do you want me to call 911?”  
“No!” He shot up suddenly, grabbing your arm, “I might- I did some bad coke. I don’t want to get arrested,”  
You shook him off, feeling his wrist for a pulse. You stopped for a moment to measure his pulse, but gave up when you realised you A) didn’t know how to take a pulse and B) lost count anyway. “I’m calling 911.” He flopped down, his face drawn with exhaustion.

Not that you were embittered by Ryan’s apparent drug overdose but you could have spent your night making the slutty outfit worth its while with anyone else. You had no idea why you were so predisposed to answering Ryan’s calls and putting Ryan ahead of the equally annoying but superficially more attractive men from your office. You just felt drawn to Ryan, he was cute in a pinch-his-cheeks sort of way (not so much as he perspired himself to death on his unmade bed) and he had a knack of doing really sweet things for you entirely inadvertently. Not that you had ever thought your relationship with Ryan extended beyond office cajoling or semi-regular hookups.

You waited in a nervous silence for the paramedics to arrive; busying yourself with a damp dishcloth to dab at Ryan’s forehead, like he was dying of consumption or something. His blue eyes (that were mostly just pupil) swivelled in his head, seemingly set tingly on you as you tried to discern whether or not he was actually going to die and what you’d do if he did die. You would panic, was your premier thought. Massive panic. “Can you sing to me?” He asked quietly, his fringe sticking to his forehead from the sweat and the dishcloth, making him look like a twelve-year-old wearing someone else’s work clothes.  
“What do you want me to sing?”  
He shrugged, and then groaned at the effort, screwing his eyes up, “My mom used to sing to me when I was sick. Sing something that she’d sing.”  
This cleared up nothing except Ryan had a weird relationship with his mother and maybe Freud was right. That being said, the paramedics were taking their sweet time in getting to you, so you murmured out as much of Blackbird as you could remember. Impressed with your performance and slightly annoyed by your audiences’ dipping in and out of consciousness, you were relieved when the paramedics finally showed up; even if you had a strange maternal panic as you handed Ryan’s body (that he may or may not have been consciously occupying at the time) over to the paramedics.

The paramedics at Ryan’s apartment had said that he wasn’t going to die (a win, you thought) but that he needed to go to hospital to get checked over at any rate. You guessed by the sun’s coming up that it was at least a semi-appropriate time to leave David an email explaining the situation but omitting the hook-up and Ryan’s probable drug addiction, so in a way not explaining the situation at all, just telling him that neither you nor Ryan would be in the office due to a medical emergency, and who really wants to go to work on a Thursday? The corridor the doctor made you sit out in (after calling you Ryan’s ‘special friend’) was of the oppressive-neon light variety that you most commonly saw in dramatic soap operas when someone was informed that they were dying/pregnant/some combination of the latter two. Thinking about soap operas and sitcoms passed a lot of the time actually, and what wasn’t taken up by considering the virtues of Chandler and Joey being gay was taken up by the horrible realisation that your very bare ass was under the very short shorts and against the very public chair. If you got some kind of disease from this, you were definitely going to make Ryan pay for your medical bills. 

Ryan, resurrected like a mid-week Jesus, shuffled out of from a grey door, less sweaty and shivery than you had received him earlier in the night. His hair was wild, the curls he tried to hard to gel and straighten out reappearing and his clothes were crumpled in the way clothes are only ever crumpled if you’ve passed out fully clothed and then been carried from ambulance to bed. “They gave me an adrenaline shot,” he said, a familiar glint returning to dark ringed eyes. You smiled, standing up and pulling your hoodie down as low as it would go, not wanting to be thrown out for flashing anyone and causing a chain reaction of heart attacks in the elderly and infirm. “Come back to mine for a coffee?”

You sat on your sofa, Ryan laying languidly across the arm of the sofa as if the night before hadn’t happened. “I think I need help,” he said lamely, not meeting your eyes.  
“I’d probably agree,”  
“What do you think?”  
You looked up, trying to gauge his reaction, “Well, I was thinking that I wanted a kitten-“  
“We’re talking about me. I don’t care about your spinster fantasies,” he rolled his eyes petulantly, taking oddly dainty sips of his coffee (did he always do that or was this the effect of a run-in with illicit stimulants?)  
“Thanks. I was thinking that if I got a cat, we could both take care of it-“  
“It kind of makes it sound like we’re dating,” Ryan said suspiciously, tilting his head and glaring at you, giving you a look that wasn’t as much contempt but betrayed a lazy attraction,  
“I’d let you name it,”  
“Jobs? Gates? Zuckerberg?”  
You smiled in spite of yourself, “I like Chairman Meow, but whatever you want to call it,”  
Ryan, fearing he looked enthusiastic about an idea that wasn’t his own, chewed his lip pensively, “It’s not your worse idea ever.”  
You’d take that.


End file.
